It was Joan.  She had already been up an hour, she told me, and had bathed before the last stars had left the sky.  I saw at once that the new spirit of this solitary region had entered into her, banishing the fears of the night, for her face was like the face of a happy denizen of the wilderness, and her eyes stainless and shining.  Her feet were bare, and drops of dew she had shaken from the branches hung in her loose-flying hair.  Obviously she had come into her own.

“I’ve been all over the island,” she announced laughingly, “and there are two things wanting.”

“You’re a good judge, Joan.  What are they?”

“There’s no animal life, and there’s no—­water.”

“They go together,” I said.  “Animals don’t bother with a rock like this unless there’s a spring on it.”

And as she led me from place to place, happy and excited, leaping adroitly from rock to rock, I was glad to note that my first impressions were correct.  She made no reference to our conversation of the night before.  The new spirit had driven out the old.  There was no room in her heart for fear or anxiety, and Nature had everything her own way.

The island, we found, was some three-quarters of a mile from point to point, built in a circle, or wide horseshoe, with an opening of twenty feet at the mouth of the lagoon.  Pine-trees grew thickly all over, but here and there were patches of silver birch, scrub oak, and considerable colonies of wild raspberry and gooseberry bushes.  The two ends of the horseshoe formed bare slabs of smooth granite running into the sea and forming dangerous reefs just below the surface, but the rest of the island rose in a forty-foot ridge and sloped down steeply to the sea on either side, being nowhere more than a hundred yards wide.

The outer shore-line was much indented with numberless coves and bays and sandy beaches, with here and there caves and precipitous little cliffs against which the sea broke in spray and thunder.  But the inner shore, the shore of the lagoon, was low and regular, and so well protected by the wall of trees along the ridge that no storm could ever send more than a passing ripple along its sandy marges.  Eternal shelter reigned there.

On one of the other islands, a few hundred yards away—­for the rest of the party slept late this first morning, and we took to the canoe—­we discovered a spring of fresh water untainted by the brackish flavour of the Baltic, and having thus solved the most important problem of the Camp, we next proceeded to deal with the second—­fish.  And in half an hour we reeled in and turned homewards, for we had no means of storage, and to clean more fish than may be stored or eaten in a day is no wise occupation for experienced campers.

And as we landed towards six o’clock we heard the clergyman singing as usual and saw his wife and Sangree shaking out their blankets in the sun, and dressed in a fashion that finally dispelled all memories of streets and civilisation.